


my heart, my hearth, my home

by ninemoons42



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) RPF
Genre: Alternate Reality, Bonfires, Cooking, Established Relationship, Fireworks, Guy Fawkes Night, Holding Hands, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-04
Updated: 2013-11-04
Packaged: 2017-12-31 11:53:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1031421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James and Michael share a meal and a quiet moment in the midst of the Bonfire Night crowds and smoke.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my heart, my hearth, my home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [papercutperfect](https://archiveofourown.org/users/papercutperfect/gifts).



> Written for the following prompt from the [McFassy Autumn Extravaganza](http://mcfassy.livejournal.com/499237.html):
> 
> _James and Michael celebrate Fireworks Night (November 5th) together. Fireworks, bonfires, sparklers and cuddling close for warmth._
> 
> Also a birthday gift for the prompter, my very best beloved papercutperfect.
> 
> \---
> 
> Thanks to Afrocurl for the quick beta.

He was standing in the produce aisle when his phone rang: the Overture of 1812, and it was silly and almost trite but it made him laugh, and moreover, James had chosen it for himself, so Michael just dropped the box of apples into his shopping cart and hit the Call button with his free hand. “Yes, James?” he asked. “I’m still here at the store, did you want me to pick up something else?”

“I love you, too,” were James’s first words, somewhere between warm and fond and teasing. Woven into the simple sweet sound of his voice was the clatter and the clash of pans being moved around. Running water. A playlist of stripped-down/acoustic tracks in places full of echoes. “And yes. I want you to get a few things extra. I,” he added, sounding happily apprehensive, “have decided to try making candy today.”

“I like candy and I love you,” Michael said, grinning at the supermarket cart that he was pushing in the general direction of the dry goods. “What did you have in mind?”

“It’ll be toffee, or at least I hope it turns out to be that,” James said, over the sounds of a knife striking a cutting board. “Bonfire toffee it’s called. So it’ll be special for tonight. I’ll text you the ingredients?”

“Yes, please.” A soft tone in his ear shortly after, the notification for a received message. “Anything else?”

“Just you, back here at home, as soon as you possibly can.”

“As if I ever wanted to be anywhere else. I’ll get this finished and hurry back.”

“You’d better.” The words were followed by a swift beep and cool silence.

Michael looked at his new message and felt his eyebrows crawling towards his hairline as he scanned the four lines. “...Cayenne pepper?” he asked out loud, heedless of the odd look this got him from one of the men browsing a display of crisps. “I thought he said candy.”

He spent a few more seconds puzzling over the message, even as he went looking for the items on James’s list. He’d have to trust him on this one; it was James who knew something about sweet things and the making of them, after all.

***

“I’m home,” Michael said as he let himself in. How he’d managed to wrangle his keys and the bulging paper sacks he had no idea.

“Welcome home,” was the answer, muffled, a little distant. Rush of water, again.

He padded past the stereo, which was stuck on Pause, about a minute and a half into the current track.

The house was full of muted soft sounds, echoing and re-echoing in corridors and doorways. Warm floorboards underfoot. Michael was not averse to turning up the thermostat, because warm rooms reminded him of home and the inn, with roaring fireplaces in the corners and an extra couple of jumpers in every room.

Since James came into his life, though, he’d learned to replace warm with toasty, and that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Toasty meant James sleeping in a nest of blankets, strands of tousled ginger sticking up at random from the pillows. Toasty meant James wrapped up in socks and several layers of shirts as he read a script with a _Star Trek_ episode on mute in the background. Toasty meant James hovering over a stove, his blue eyes in no way diminished by the clouds of fragrant steam sent up by whatever he was making.

So he wasn’t entirely surprised to step into a kitchen that was hot enough for sweat to prickle up on the back of his neck.

And he wasn’t surprised to see that there were a lot of containers stacked neatly on the counters, here and there and everywhere he looked.

In the middle of it all: James and a cloud of savory smells. “I can see you drooling all the way over there,” he joked as he tossed the contents of two small ramekins into the pot he was watching carefully. “Question is, what are you drooling at exactly?”

“You,” Michael said, rolling his eyes when James made a disbelieving face at him.

“You disappoint me,” James snickered as he began to stir again. “Because I’m making what my gran called proposal soup.”

“Everyone else is about a few months too late,” Michael growled as he came closer - close enough to peer into the rich dark-brown bubbling away in the depths of the pot. He could smell herbs and onions and meat.

“That they are,” James laughed, turning his left hand to show off the silver ring encircling the fourth finger - a precise match to the ring Michael was wearing on his own left hand.

Michael sat down within arm’s-reach of James, where there was a bowl and a napkin and a large soup spoon already waiting for him.

Someone’s stomach rumbled and James grinned down into his pot, while Michael snorted and reached for a hunk of bread from one of the sideboards. “Hurry up,” he growled fondly. “Or you’ll be dinner and then where would we be?”

“I am not missing out on the fireworks this year, thank you very much.”

“So, food.”

“Pushy!” But James laughed and reached for a dish of lemons, neatly cut into quarters, and he threw a piece into the pot and then turned off the heat with a flourish.

Michael slid his bowl in James’s direction, and took it back, nearly full to the brim, with both hands. Dark brown liquid, hearty and savory smells, unexpected bright citrus punch. All of that was nothing compared to the first sip. A witch’s brew. It seemed to warm him all the way out to his toes, to his fingers, to the very tips of his ears. Hints of spice, of unexpected sweetness - and he looked up at James, swallowed, and opened his mouth to say something about the soup.

Not a thing came out.

James seemed to understand him just fine. “I already said Yes, you daft man.”

Michael fumbled around frantically for his words and finally managed to unstick his tongue. “What the hell did I just put in my mouth? Because I’ve never tasted anything so good before.”

That won him a laugh, a full-on shout of pure happiness. After he’d settled down, he smiled, kissed Michael’s cheek, and went to wash his hands. “Mission accomplished.”

Michael watched James move around the kitchen, completely at home even as he put everything he’d used away: there was some kind of haphazard grace in the way he tossed containers back into drawers and cabinets, reckless and precarious and beautiful.

And that sort of went hand-in-hand with the idea of having had the ring on his hand for a relatively short time, which only felt like forever.

It was hard to remember that he once made a habit out of waking up alone, whether in his own bed or in some interchangeable hotel room; it was hard to remember walking and working through the days and nights by himself.

Now was utterly and completely different, because there was someone to wake up next to, someone to call and text and email and Skype and talk to, someone who was now pulling on both a stripey jumper _and_ a leather jacket.

On anyone else the combination would not have worked at all - especially taking into the consideration the part where the points of James’s collar were skewed in two different directions. But somehow, on him, it just worked.

“I look drab in comparison,” Michael joked as he put his now-empty soup bowl in the sink, as he pulled on a heavy sports jacket and made sure to tuck a black ski cap into one of his pockets. “Not sure I’d be entirely fit to go out in public.”

A brief smile that was no less bright for all that it was aimed more in the general direction of the toffee ingredients, carefully set aside away from the stove. “Then again, you’re to have me by your side. Do you really need any more accessorizing?” James joked as they headed out, hand in hand, to a street awash in dimmed light.

Overhead, the sky was starting to fill with stars.

There was something a shade _too_ self-deprecating in this current grin, though, and it made Michael frown, and stop dead on the sidewalk, and pull James in against him, roughly and suddenly enough that James said “Oof!” when they were suddenly snug against each other, nose-to-throat.

“Please don’t do that,” Michael said, quiet and intense and steely, as he put his hands on James’s shoulders. “There’s absolutely no reason for you to put yourself down. And you - you’re never going to be just someone’s decoration. Not mine, at least. You’re wonderful, and you’re amazing, and you cook like heaven itself, and I’d never be able to live without you, now that I know what it’s like to be with you.”

A moment of silence, a moment when James’s dark eyes were not on him, and then - a softer smile, a truer smile. A smile like James had when he was staring into the depths of his soup.

Michael watched him open his mouth - watched him think better of it - and closed his eyes as James pulled him into a kiss. Sweet. Warm. _Needing._

He slid his hands down James’s arms, to his wrists - not to pull him away, not to pull him closer. Just to hold him in place as they kissed in the dusk, lingering exchanges, nothing that would get them arrested. Just everything that was their hearts and their minds, communicating wordlessly.

***

The air was full of the distinct burning scent of gunpowder, and the stars overhead had long since vanished in smoke.

The crowd pushed and jostled and screamed with delight at each new explosion: colors in the sky, new and manmade shooting stars. Flowers in flame.

Michael wasn’t looking up at all.

Fireworks reflected in James’s eyes. His mouth open in a bright and incredulous smile.

They were wrapped around each other, James’s broad back against Michael’s front. Fingers tangled together against James’s stomach.

Their hands still stank strongly of cordite and fuses. Dusty ash on their shoes and soot everywhere, the remains of the sparklers that several children had passed through the crowd. Every time he blinked he could still see the pulsing afterimages of those fierce, temporary splashes of white-hot sparks.

The music rose to a crescendo and the crowd began to sing, and Michael smiled and leaned into James and sang to him, just for him, softly, not an inch of space between the two of them as the final volleys lit up the night - fires in the sky, flames leaping up and flinging the darkness away, and James laughed and turned around in Michael’s arms and shouted, _“I bloody love you!”_ for all the world to hear, for Michael alone - and the kiss that followed would have outshone all of the fireworks with its bright incendiary strength, would have blinded him if he’d been paying attention - but he was too busy being consumed, willingly burning, with James, _for_ James.


End file.
